Culture and Society: the ephemeris in the context of the Portuguese Charity Societies of Rio Grande do Sul in the nineteenth century.

Abstract

This work deals with the study of ephemeris and their symbols, carried out in the Portuguese Charity Society in the south of Brazil, as well as their articulated representation in the cities of Porto Alegre, Pelotas, Rio Grande and Bagé. The Portuguese Charity Society is a hospital foundation created by Portuguese immigrants in Brazil and in the Portuguese colonial world as a whole, from the second half of the nineteenth century, depending on the payments and donations coming from its associates. In the province, the primordial function of the charity societies was the promotion of public representation of the immigrants as individuals of good education and culture, as well as in the promotion of the devotion to the royal Portuguese monarchy, revealing the symbolic relations of power, crossing the functioning of these institutions. In this sense, the study analyzes how the events, materialized by ephemeris celebrations and their symbolic symbols, represent the representation of the Portuguese space of action in the local communities and Portugal, in a network of intentional relations that perpetuate the expansion. The support and protection of the Portuguese monarch, represented in different ways, from headquarters buildings to portraits of the King, were relevant to the local/regional projection of his associates.